So far this year, Justin Verlander has allowed more foul balls to be hit off him than any other pitcher in the majors. He also leads in the category of foul balls in two strike counts, with 178. Below are the top 50 pitchers in the majors, through yesterdays game, in foul balls allowed. The number in parenthesis is the foul balls hit against them in two strike counts.

Here’s how this year’s All Star rosters would look if position players were selected by who hit the most foul balls. Which is obviously ridiculous, because they SHOULD be selected by who gets hit by the most pitches.

Yesterday, Corey Hart hit a foul ball. That doesn’t sound like news, but yesterday was the first time he’d hit a foul ball since May 31st, so he was 0 for June in foul ball hitting. He snapped a streak of 22 consecutive plate appearances without fouling a ball out of play. And that’s kind of weird.
So, here’s where that streak ranks on the list of consecutive plate appearances without a foul ball since 2005:

There’s been a trend for a while now, that batters like to “work the pitch count”, and hit a lot of foul balls to tire out the opposing pitcher. It might not be a real trend – it might just be something baseball announcers like to talk about, or praise a batter for “battling”, and taking a lot of pitches in a plate appearance. Or, it might just be clever marketing by the guys who buy ad space on those scrolling signs behind home plate. They probably slip a few bucks Dustin Pedroia to foul off a lot of pitches so their sign will stay on TV longer. But anyway, it kind of makes you wonder if hitting a lot of foul balls does anybody any good… and in my case, it makes me wonder if pitchers who give up a lot of foul balls are more likely to plunk someone.

On the plunk rate thing, the results are inconclusive – here are the HBP rates groups by the number of foul balls the pitcher had given up so far in that game, at the time of the HBP. (For 2011 game data, through May 26)

Fouls

PA per HBP

Total PA

0 to 4

112.2

26477

5 to 9

135.7

13570

10 to 14

127.8

9327

15 to 20

132.0

5015

21 to 25

131.1

1835

26 to 30

125.0

375

31 to 35

N/A

65

35 to 40

N/A

2

So… they hit batters the most before they’ve given up 5 foul balls, and then… well there’s not exactly a clear trend there, but it’s all pretty close. I think we can safely say that at least this year, hitting a lot of foul balls off a pitcher doesn’t make that pitcher more likely to hit someone. The total HBP rate this year is one plunk per 122.1 batters, at the moment.

But what about individual batters? Do all their foul balls get annoying and make the batter hit them as the game goes on? Here are the rates by the batters total fouls hit during the game:

Fouls

PA per HBP

Total PA

0

126.6

17217

1

117.7

14471

2

119.3

10258

3

94.3

6411

4

172.0

3784

5

108.4

2167

6

378.4

1135

7

312.5

625

8

151.0

302

9

147.0

147

10 or more

149.0

149

It looks like hitting 3 foul balls will increase your likelihood of getting an HBP, but any fouls you hit after that are going to make you fairly unlikely to be plunked.

While we’re at this, how does that work for fouls in a single plate appearance? Here are the rates base on the foul balls hit in each plate appearance:

Fouls

PA per HBP

Total PA

0

121.3

32377

1

115.5

15128

2

112.6

6078

3

291.0

2037

4

171.0

684

5

243.0

243

6 or more

0.0

119

So a batter with three foul balls in a plate appearance gets hit once per 291 times, but a batter with three foul balls hit in the game gets hit once every 94.3 plate appearance… kind of makes you think there might not be any connection at all between these stats… but lets brush that aside.

And now, here’s the batting stats other people might care about. Below are the popular offensive numbers, grouped by number of foul balls hit in the plate appearance.

Fouls

PA

OBP

SLG

AVG

OPS

PA per HR

0

32377

.350

.447

.285

.797

37.10

1

15128

.287

.330

.219

.616

55.00

2

6078

.255

.268

.179

.523

65.40

3

2037

.265

.285

.178

.550

56.60

4

684

.297

.277

.181

.574

57.00

5

243

.346

.354

.212

.699

48.60

6 or more

119

.294

.337

.192

.631

29.80

Of course the problem with hitting a lot of foul balls, is that the batter is spending a lot of time in 2-strike counts, so it kind of makes sense that hitting a lot fouls is not healthy for your offensive numbers. If you’ve already hit two foul balls (or have two strikes) you can help your cause a little bit by fouling off a couple of more pitches – but you’re not going to help it much. If you can get from 2 fouls to 5 fouls you can pull that situational OPS up from .523 to .699. And that’s only a few points below the league average.

Oh right, but the benefit of hitting lots of fouls is supposed to be evident later in the game when you’ve worn the pitcher down. Lets see how well that works – Here’s the opponents batting numbers based on the number of fouls a pitcher gives up in a game:

Fouls

PA

OBP

SLG

AVG

OPS

PA per HR

0 to 4

26477

.326

.381

.251

.707

46.50

5 to 9

13570

.314

.391

.247

.705

41.80

10 to 14

9327

.310

.397

.249

.707

38.70

15 to 20

5015

.318

.384

.252

.702

50.70

21 to 25

1835

.310

.402

.249

.712

38.20

26 to 30

375

.323

.465

.282

.788

31.30

31 to 35

65

.200

.323

.161

.523

21.70

35 to 40

2

.500

.500

.500

1.000

N/A

If you take a look at that table of numbers, you’ll notice… that they pretty much don’t change. Look at the OPS column – it barely changes until you get into the tiny sample sizes. The overall league OPS this year is .707, and the opponents OPS based on the number of foul balls the pitcher has given up barely moves from that number. So what’s that supposed to mean, that managers are just SO good at watching pitchers pitch counts that they pull them out before they give up so many foul balls that they start to struggle?

If anyone is getting tired and starting to struggle after all these fouls, it looks more like it’s the batters.
Here are the batters offensive numbers, split by the number of foul balls they’ve hit in the game:

Fouls

PA

OBP

SLG

AVG

OPS

PA per HR

0

17217

.343

.441

.281

.784

37.00

1

14471

.311

.375

.245

.685

46.80

2

10258

.308

.371

.237

.679

42.00

3

6411

.311

.354

.233

.665

52.10

4

3784

.289

.331

.217

.620

58.20

5

2167

.333

.378

.238

.711

45.10

6

1135

.301

.326

.221

.628

59.70

7

625

.306

.368

.230

.674

N/A

8

302

.325

.338

.241

.663

N/A

9

147

.231

.242

.152

.474

N/A

10 or more

149

.295

.290

.198

.585

N/A

Here are the league leaders this year, in unnecessarily tiring themselves out by hitting so many foul balls:

Here it is two days into July, and you probably have no idea who’s leading the league in hitting foul balls. You’ve probably already filled out your 25 all-star ballots without that key piece of information. 60,105 foul balls have already been hit and you probably don’t even know that Dustin Pedroia leads the league, having hit 301 of them. Pedroia has hit 0.5% of all foul balls hit in the majors this year, even though he certainly does not account for 0.5% of total major league players, by weight. As far as we know.

But before we get to the individual leaders, here’s a quick breakdown of foul balls by batter and pitcher hand:

vs RHP

vs LHP

Total

batter hand

fouls

fouls per pitch

fouls

fouls per pitch

fouls

fouls per pitch

R

23,458

0.175

11,767

0.172

35,225

0.174

L

20,193

0.173

4,687

0.170

24,880

0.172

total

43,651

0.174

16,454

0.172

60,105

0.173

It seems that right handed batters have hit about 1% more foul balls per pitch than lefties this year, and right handed pitchers have given up about 1% more foul balls than left handed pitchers. So, if you’re a fan of increasing souvenir baseballs hit into the stands, you’ll want to push for more right handers in the game, but if you’re one of those people who thinks the games are taking to long, you should advocate more lefties, since less foul balls should mean a shorter game.

*Plate appearances, for this purpose, may include situations where a runner was put out to end an inning, but the batter had already taken some pitches, or hit some foul balls.

And, here’s a bunch of other stuff you might want to know, in case you’re interested in the fact that Johnny Damon is 15th in foul balls by left handed batters or that David Wright has hit the 5th most fouls against right handed pitchers, or that Daric Barton has hit the most left handed foul balls against right handed pitchers with 205.

Most of this year’s playoff races have been over for a long time, with the exception of a couple of teams torturing their fans by refusing to clinch their divisions, but there are some statistical races of note that could still come to exciting conclusions in these last three games, if you’re willing to care about some things that maybe not everyone is excited about.

First, and possibly most importantly, is the American League Most Plunkable Player race. Chase Utley has the NL locked up, but the AL race looks like this:Kelly Shoppach – 18Brandon Inge – 17Shin-Soo Choo – 17Kevin Youkilis – 16

It might be tough for Youkilis to take 3 plunks in meaningless games while resting for a playoff chase, so he’s probably not going to do catch Shoppach. Brandon Inge, on the other hand, is still trying to clinch a division title for the Tigers, so he might be doing whatever it takes to get on base. So there could be an exciting finish there.

And, since this is Friday, lets look at the foul balls race. Brian Roberts is leading the American League, and has the overall lead with 553 foul balls this year. He’s got a commanding lead over 2nd place AL foul ball hitter Carl Crawford who has 517. But in the NL, Andre Ethier, Todd Helton and Pablo Sandoval are all close with 532, 530 and 523. Just for fun, imagine a world in which suddenly people cared about this and Todd Helton went out on Sunday with the sole purpose of winning the NL Foul Ball title. Like when David Robinson wanted to beat Shaq for the scoring title in 1994 and scored 71 points. Just Todd Helton out there fouling balls off all afternoon. How long would the other team put up with that before just throwing at him or walking him? Could he work through three relief pitchers in one plate appearance? Would the sports pundit world have to tranquilized by a special team of government operatives sent out to save the industry from itself?

Another close one you might not have noticed is the Sacrifice Fly race in both leagues – in the NL, Bengie Molina has a slim lead with 11 sac flies, but Todd Helton and Casey Blake are right behind him with 10. In the AL, Orlando Cabrera, Marlon Byrd and Nick Markakis are all tied with 10. So there could be an exciting moment this weekend when one of these guys has a runner on third and is desperately hoping his foul ball to center field comes down on the warning track for a title winning sacrifice fly instead of just one more unimportant home run. It could happen.

On the pitching side of things, Dave Bush is just one plunk ahead of Johnny Cueto for the National League plunking title with 15 hit batters, so that could lead to some excitment with both scheduled to pitch on Saturday. On the AL side, Joba Chamberlain leads the league with 12 plunks, but Kevin Millwood and Matt Garza have 11, and Tim Wakefield, Ervin Santana, Ricky Romero, and AJ Burnett have 10 each.

Back in the generally unheralded batting statistics, Ryan Howard looks to have locked up the 2009 NL title for total swings of the bat with 1371 so far. Mark Reynolds is next with 1247, so he probably can’t catch Howard unless he goes on a foul ball tear like Todd Helton is planning. In the AL, Aaron Hill has swung his bat 1,266 times this year, which sounds tiring, but he’s only 37 swings ahed of Derek Jeter. Jeter has an outside show at catching Hill. Back in the National League, Ryan Howard has more swings but he trails Mark Reynolds by 15 whiffs. Reynolds has swung and missed a league leading 460 times, while Howard has whiffed 445 times. They’re both far ahead of American League leader Carlos Pena who has missed 346 times but isn’t far ahead of Russel Branyan’s 337 misses. Reynolds leads qualified batters with a miss percentage of .369 – he misses the ball with 36.9% of his swings, while his closest competitor, Ryan Howard misses at a .325 clip. Chris Davis leads the AL in miss rate at .364, and probably won’t be caught by Miguel Olivo who has missed at .355. On the other end of that same idea, Placido Polanco has led the American League this year, making contact with 93.71% of his swings, though Marco Scutaro is right behind him at 93.67% so that’s race could go to either of them. In the NL, Luis Castillo has made contact 93.63% of the times he’s tried to, with Juan Piere right behind him at 93.57%. Dustin Pedroia is fifth overall in the majors, and has a shot to catch the AL leaders with his contact percentage at 93.41%.

In the statistical category I call BACON, Ichiro Suzuki still has a chance to be the first player in Bacon history to break .900. Though Bacon history only goes back to 2005, because that’s all I’ve done with it. Ichiro made it until this week before going hitless in two consecutive games. In the past 5 seasons, no other players has had fewer than 3 instances of back to back hitless games. That’s just some amazing consistency there. In the NL, there is a tight race for the top BACON among qualified batters (500 plate appeances, about) – Felipe Lopez and Hanley Ramirez are both at .796 right now, and Albert Pujols is right behind them at .786.

And one last thing to watch for is whether or not Jeff Weaver will plunk anyone to catch Tim Wakefield for the most plunks of the 00s. Wakefield has hit 107 batters from 2000 to 2009, and is likely done for the season unless someone poisons the rest of the red sox staff and no one else can pitch or something. Weaver may get an opportunity in any of the final games, and has hit 106 batters. He would probably have an easy win in this category if he had played at all in 2008.

Wednesday, I put up a post about rating plunks by difficulty, and what batters have had the most HBPs by difficulty. The theory being that we could rank plunks by how frequently the thrower of each plunk throws plunks, and then add up the scores to see which batters have been hit the most by the pitchers who don’t hit that many batters. So, reader KL Snow was intrigued by that, but more interested in applying the same method to home runs. The only problem is, I’m not a huge fan of home runs and usually try not to write about them, but I do like to answer questions when people take the time to leave a comment and ask them. Home runs just still have a certain ‘roidiness surrounding them, aside from their being somewhat overrated as a stat in the first place, and generally taking too much focus away from HBPs. So, in a very confusing compromise, here’s a post about home runs by difficulty, badly disguised as a post about foul balls.

As we know, lots of people are good at hitting foul balls. And some batters are good at hitting home runs. But it’s a lot easier to hit home runs off some pitchers than others, and some pitchers hardly ever give up homers. So what happens if we can find a way to confuse the matter rate home runs by difficulty for those batters who have hit the most foul balls? Or look at who has hit the most foul balls among those who have hit the most difficult home runs?

There are a lot of factors that go into the difficulty of the home run, and among the top of the list are the ball park and the weather. But we’ll ignore those for now and just look at which pitchers have given up homers at the highest rate this year. If we take each homer and assign it a score based on the pitchers’ Batters Faced per Home Run Allowed, we can add those up for each batter and get their total home run difficulty. So, since Carlos Marmol has given up only 1 homer to the 324 batters he’s faced, that homer is worth 324 points to the guy who hit it (John Baker). Chris Sampson has given up 2 homers to the 248 batters he’s faces, so those homers are worth 124 points each – although both were to Alfonso Soriano so he gets 248 points for the 2 of them. Zack Greinke has given up 11 homers to 860 batters, so each of those homers is worth 78.18 points to the batters who have hit them. And, since Braden Looper has given up 37 homers in his 859 batters faced this year, his homers are only worth 21.86 difficulty points to the batters who hit them. Makes sense, right?

Here are the home run difficulty scores for the top ten foul ball hitters this season, and their HBPs, just because:

Batter

Foul Balls

Home Run Difficulty

Home Runs

HBP

Brian Roberts (BAL)

535

519

15

2

Todd Helton (COL)

509

530

14

2

Carl Crawford (TB)

509

502

14

8

Pablo Sandoval (SF)

505

871

22

4

Andre Ethier (LAD)

501

1055

31

13

Derek Jeter (NYY)

501

580

17

4

Aaron Hill (TOR)

481

1060

33

5

Ryan Howard (PHI)

477

1784

42

6

Shin-Soo Choo (CLE)

475

569

17

15

Jayson Werth (PHI)

472

1275

34

8

And here are the top 20 batters in home run difficulty, with their foul ball and HBP totals as a side order:

Batter

Home Run Difficulty

Home Runs

Average HR difficulty

Foul Balls

HBP

Mark Reynolds (ARI)

1988

43

46.23

422

4

Ryan Howard (PHI)

1784

42

42.49

477

6

Prince Fielder (MIL)

1651

42

39.3

447

9

Albert Pujols (STL)

1620

47

34.47

390

9

Adam Dunn (WSH)

1448

38

38.1

444

4

Adrian Gonzalez (SD)

1432

39

36.72

432

5

Carlos Pena (TB)

1326

39

34

375

9

Raul Ibanez (PHI)

1298

33

39.32

332

4

Jayson Werth (PHI)

1275

34

37.51

472

8

Chase Utley (PHI)

1247

31

40.24

393

23

Evan Longoria (TB)

1237

31

39.89

399

8

Derrek Lee (CHC)

1226

35

35.03

380

3

Ryan Zimmerman (WSH)

1220

31

39.36

392

2

Russell Branyan (SEA)

1219

31

39.34

377

9

Mark Teixeira (NYY)

1217

37

32.88

388

11

Kendry Morales (LAA)

1213

31

39.14

410

2

Dan Uggla (FLA)

1202

30

40.06

406

7

Justin Morneau (MIN)

1194

30

39.8

401

3

Jason Bay (BOS)

1166

36

32.39

354

9

Paul Konerko (CWS)

1145

28

40.89

350

10

As you can see, Mark Reynolds is leading the league in home run diffuculty, by a pretty wide margin (but he’s not in the top 20 in foul balls, and has only 2 HBPs). His most difficult plunk was off Joel Pineiro, who has only given up 7 homers while facing 815 batters. Reynolds is also the only batter to homer off of Cristhian Martinez, Boone Logan, and Josh Wilson, although only two of those rate as difficult, because Josh Wilson has only faced 10 batters this year. Reynolds has the highest average difficulty per homer of any batter with 15 or more homers, but he has 43. He also has struck out 208 times this season, breaking his own single season strikeout record, and he’s the only batter ever to strike out 200 times in a season, as well as the only batter to strike out 200 times in back to back seasons, so he’s got that going for him.

Among the top 20 batters in total difficulty, Prince Fielder has the highest score on a single homer. He hit the only homer this season off Blaine Boyer, and Boyer has faced 230 batters. That’s the third highest difficulty score of this season behind John Baker’s homer of Carlos Marmol (324 batters faced per homer), and Ryan Sweeney’s homer off Robinson Tejada (269 batters faced per homer).

Albert Pujols leads the majors with 47 homers, but he’s kind of feasted on cupcakes, relatively speaking. He’s tied with Jason Bay for the most home runs off pitchers who give one up more often than once every 30 batters, with 18 each. Pujols most difficult homer scored just 58.8 points, off Sean Green.

As you can see from the next list, Mark Reynolds also leads the league in home run difficulty among those with at last 400 foul balls hit:

Batter

Home Run Difficulty

Home Runs

Average HR difficulty

Foul Balls

HBP

Mark Reynolds (ARI)

1988

43

46.23

422

4

Ryan Howard (PHI)

1784

42

42.49

477

6

Prince Fielder (MIL)

1651

42

39.3

447

9

Adam Dunn (WSH)

1448

38

38.1

444

4

Adrian Gonzalez (SD)

1432

39

36.72

432

5

Jayson Werth (PHI)

1275

34

37.51

472

8

Kendry Morales (LAA)

1213

31

39.14

410

2

Dan Uggla (FLA)

1202

30

40.06

406

7

Justin Morneau (MIN)

1194

30

39.8

401

3

Michael Cuddyer (MIN)

1138

29

39.25

418

3

But, Chase Utley leads the league in home run difficulty among players with at least 10 HBPs (which is really the standard all stats should be qualified by – if you haven’t been hit by ten pitches, your season just shouldn’t count):

Batter

Home Run Difficulty

Home Runs

Average HR difficulty

Foul Balls

HBP

Chase Utley (PHI)

1247

31

40.24

393

23

Mark Teixeira (NYY)

1217

37

32.88

388

11

Paul Konerko (CWS)

1145

28

40.89

350

10

Andre Ethier (LAD)

1055

31

34.03

501

13

Brandon Inge (DET)

1047

27

38.79

383

17

Ryan Braun (MIL)

1044

29

36.02

416

12

Clint Barmes (COL)

1015

23

44.14

456

10

Josh Willingham (WSH)

884

23

38.45

315

12

Kevin Youkilis (BOS)

813

25

32.51

411

14

Kevin Kouzmanoff (SD)

662

17

38.91

391

10

And lastly, just because it might be interesting, here are the ten lowest average difficulty scores among players with 30 or more homers:

Batter

Home Run Difficulty

Home Runs

Average HR difficulty

Foul Balls

HBP

Miguel Cabrera (DET)

913

31

29.45

451

5

Aaron Hill (TOR)

1060

33

32.12

481

5

Jason Bay (BOS)

1166

36

32.39

354

9

Mark Teixeira (NYY)

1217

37

32.88

388

11

Carlos Pena (TB)

1326

39

34

375

9

Andre Ethier (LAD)

1055

31

34.03

501

13

Troy Tulowitzki (COL)

1027

30

34.23

415

2

Nelson Cruz (TEX)

1101

32

34.41

305

2

Albert Pujols (STL)

1620

47

34.47

390

9

Derrek Lee (CHC)

1226

35

35.03

380

3

Andre Ethier, Ryan Braun and Clint Barmes are the only players this season with at least 10 plunks, at least 400 foul balls hit, and over 1000 total home run difficulty points.